Second String
by Late2SGA
Summary: An entry in the Ancient database leads the Team to a facility with hoped-for Ancient tech...or is the technology more than they hoped for? Takes place S3, before Tao of Rodney. Team fic.


~ Second String ~

An Author's Note follows the story.

Word Count: 5259

Characters: Sheppard, Rodney, Teyla, Ronon.

Warning: Vague reference to Real World and sort-of allusion to the upcoming Tao of Rodney.

Disclaimer: 'Stargate Atlantis' and its characters are not mine. I would not have left them under the aegis of those whose interest lay elsewhere.

SGA ~ SGA ~ SGA

The rippling blue wall behind him was casting eerie shadows when John Sheppard walked into the room. He panned the light of his P90 around the empty space as his teammates began their own examination of the area. "Not much of a Gate Room. How big's this place?" he asked the scientific member of the group.

Rodney McKay hadn't looked up from his handscanner since emerging from the Puddle. He studied the small screen, pressed buttons, and absently answered, "Bigger than a breadbox."

John stopped exploring and directed his light at McKay.

Rodney looked up, squinted into John's light and glowered, then went back to his scanner. "There are three levels," he lectured impatiently, "two below us, and three wings- " He pointed. "...there, there and there. No transporter, but stairs in the middle of each wing." He pressed a button. "This seems to be the only room with viable conditions." More button pressing. "Most of the rooms are about this size, so," he repeated snidely, "bigger than a breadbox." He frowned in mild confusion. "There's a strong reading of...indeterminate power..." He trailed off.

"Not a ZPM?" Teyla prompted.

The purpose of the mission was to discover if anything useful, particularly ZPMs, had been left behind at what was thought to be an Ancient outpost in a hostile environment. The Database entry was vague and open to interpretation, however Elizabeth Weir was an expert in the Ancient language. Her translation indicated an experimental facility and intense power usage.

"We knew the environment was being maintained," John reasoned. "What else is goin' on to require massive power outlay?" The sense of anticipation, of lying in wait, was very different from the comfortable presence that surrounded him in Atlantis. John ruefully recognized he hadn't been 'comfortable' anywhere since a food fiasco had confined half the Expedition to bed-rest.

The Gate shut down, leaving the room illuminated by two P90 lights, the handscanner screen, and Ronon's wrist light.

"Perhaps we could return in suits so we may explore beyond this room," Teyla suggested. She aimed her P90 light through a glass partition, down the dark hall of one of the wings.

"Anybody see anything that could be the DHD?" John asked.

McKay was still pressing buttons. "I'll try to engage and expand life support, but I can't seem to connect. The handscanner isn't recognizing the system."

John swept his light over the plain walls and up to the low, flat ceiling. "Not really what you'd call 'Lantean style'. System could be too old or too different for the handscanner to connect."

"Here," Ronon called and gestured at a panel in the wall. He opened the cover to reveal a control array, including the DHD.

Rodney enthused, "Now I should be able to do something."

A wisp of sound drew John's attention. "You hear that?"

"Perhaps the caretaker coming to accuse us of trespassing?" McKay snarked, still pressing scanner buttons while he studied the controls. "The building is old and probably creaky."

"I did not hear anything, John," Teyla said thoughtfully, "but there is an atmosphere that is unsettling."

Rodney grimaced in disgust. "I assure you, we are the only ones here, despite your supposed sensitivity to 'atmosphere'."

While they waited on McKay John pondered aloud, "If this place is empty because the Ancients took everything with them when they closed up shop, why's the Gate still here? The last guy to leave turned off the lights but left the door open and the electricity hooked up? Doesn't make sense."

"It is a puzzle," Teyla agreed. "If the facility was of no use, why leave resources to maintain an empty building?"

"Maybe it isn't empty," John replied, then drawled, "which we could see for ourselves if _McKay_ would hurry up." John felt a whisper. A moment later a breath of moving air touched him as the glass door behind him slid open. Diffuse floor lighting glowed the length of the hallway. "Good job, Rodney."

McKay looked up from the array in the wall, where he was juggling the scanner, his laptop, and cables.

John moved closer to study the shadows beyond the opened entryway. Ronon and Teyla sidled up beside him. The corridor was dim, with an air of expectation. Over his shoulder John addressed Rodney, "Open the other wings, then see if you can figure out why this place was built. And abandoned." Before the trio left the room John specified, "Twenty minutes, McKay."

"What is with you and arbitrary numbers?" Rodney grumbled. He opened his laptop and prepared to type.

John turned and leveled a stare. "I wanna be outta here in an hour. Twenty minutes to check each wing of the 'breadbox'."

"What's your hurry?"

"Call it a hunch."

"What do you mean, 'call it a hunch'?" There was suspicion, a touch of panic and finally dismissal in McKay's voice. "If this is about your tummy bug, you could have stayed in bed. We came here to find ZedPMs or whatever might be useful," Rodney argued. "The Gate is the only thing with power I recognize. All other systems are being powered by something else and whatever it is," he waggled the handscanner, "there's apparently a lot of it and since I can't pinpoint it with this," he waved the scanner again, "I'll need more time."

John repeated, "Twenty minutes," and stepped into the hall.

SGA ~ SGA ~ SGA

"Twenty minutes. Open the wings," Rodney mimicked. He felt ill-used. He should be exploring the facility, tracking down the energy readings. That was, afterall, why they'd come. Alternative energy, or more important, a reproducible power source, would solve their problems. "They wouldn't know what to look for," he groused, then settled himself comfortably on the floor.

Like the handscanner, the laptop wasn't making a connection. Rodney typed, to create a basic handshake to identify the facility's system. Twenty minutes wasn't very long to figure out how to open partitions and expand life support. He'd seen no change in power distribution, but power was needed to open the door, turn on lights and circulate more air. And how was the system able to respond when the scanner didn't identify an ATA field?

Sheppard and his arbitrary twenty minutes, Rodney fumed. It wasn't going to be long enough. They'd all be traipsing into the Gate Room, expecting him to have performed his usual genius-inspired miracle. Were they back already? "Hello?"

Rodney took a penlight from his pocket and panned the empty room. He huffed. Teyla's 'atmosphere' and Sheppard's 'caretaker' were grating on his nerves. He set the light on its end. The beam bounced off the ceiling and added to the glow of the computer and scanner screens. Twenty minutes wasn't enough.

Teyla's voice in his earbud was a startling intrusion into Rodney's internal rant: "John, Ronon, Rodney. You must see this. I am in the next-to-last room on the right of the second level."

"Now what," Rodney griped, grabbing scanner and penlight.

SGA ~ SGA ~ SGA

John was standing in the center of a room, lost in contemplation so that he nearly missed Teyla's voice. The design of the space was more Lantean in style than what they'd previously observed. When their search began, he, Ronon and Teyla had been able to check fairly quickly the empty rooms on either side of the hall. When they reached the stair access, John had sent Teyla and Ronon to survey the lower levels while he had followed the floor lighting, which led him to his current location.

Despite McKay's comments, the twenty minutes John had designated were not arbitrary. Truth was, his neck had been itching since they arrived. The place looked Lantean, but not quite. It felt Lantean, except not quite. There was no explanation for infrequent hints of sound nor for the 'atmosphere' Teyla felt; something was 'off'. There was too much at stake to ignore the possibility of acquiring ZPMs or some adaptable power supply, but John didn't want to tarry. If all the rooms were empty, they could easily clear the entire complex within an hour. In fact, John expected his teammates to return soon with nothing to report, and as far as he was concerned, the sooner the better.

The lights had turned on when John crossed the threshold, inviting a leisurely perusal. The warm glow in the room was at odds with its 'feel' of purpose. The outlines of absent furniture made John think the space had been a lab. Perhaps a team should be assigned to investigate. There might be hidden equipment, the way the DHD was located in a hidden array.

John considered the logistical problem. The power source was integrated into the physical structure of the facility, so could they transfer and adapt it to function within Atlantis? A group of scientific personnel would need to study the building.

John paused to listen to the random sibilant murmur as he considered further examination of an empty building. He frowned to re-focus his thoughts. A deep breath cleared his head just as Teyla's voice speaking his name entered his reverie.

SGA ~ SGA ~ SGA

By the time he arrived in answer to Teyla's summons ~ after marching down halls and stomping down stairs ~ Rodney had built up a full head of steam. He was pretty certain his physical presence was not required, which meant the useless side-trip was frittering away Sheppard's arbitrary twenty minutes; Rodney intended to make his frustration known. Navigating in the dark with only his flashlight had added to his temper.

Rodney stepped off the last stair and entered the hall. Stark shadows, created by various team lights, distorted familiar faces. As he approached, the others silently moved back from the window to allow him an unobstructed view of the room's macabre scene. Hand-held illumination was sufficient to reveal the agony of the tableau's participants in their final moments.

It took effort to shift his gaze. Rodney slowly looked down at his scanner. "There's no breathable atmosphere and the temperature- " He pressed a button. "...is very cold. It's like storing apples throughout the year ~ low oxygen, low temperature, and you can maintain most anything for a long time. In this case, halon gas and very low temperature have sustained things for a very very very long time." He looked soberly through the transparent pane at the three people whose demise had been preserved for untold millennia. He said in quiet understanding, "The door is still open and the electricity's still hooked up because the last guy to leave never really left."

"They would not do this to themselves," Teyla opined.

"So, who turned off the lights?" Ronon asked.

Sudden awareness made Rodney gasp. "Where's Sheppard?"

Teyla tapped her earbud. "John? Where are you? ...John?"

"I have him." Rodney pressed buttons on the handscanner. "He's one floor up, in the same relative posit- " The scanner went dark. Rodney shook it and tapped at more buttons.

"Dead battery," Ronon declared.

"It doesn't run on bat- Nevermind," Rodney finished tersely. "This shouldn't happen." He shook the scanner again.

Teyla was already racing down the hall toward the stairs. Ronon hurried after her, leaving Rodney to bring up the rear.

SGA ~ SGA ~ SGA

He had anticipated that the inspection of the other levels wouldn't take long, so when John heard Teyla's voice and he felt the air shift, he turned to listen to her report. No one was there. What he had sensed was the closing of the door.

'John.'

Teyla's voice again. John swiveled toward a corner, but the voice seemed to have no specific location. What the hell?

"John, Ronon, Rodney. You must see this. I am in the next-to-last room on the right of the second lev- "

The voice in John's ear was instantly recognizable and very definitely located. With a determined stride John crossed the room and abruptly came to a halt ~ the door didn't open.

'John.' Still Teyla's voice, but insistent.

"Whatever you are, I'm not listening." He saw no obvious control crystals so John passed his hand over the wall along the entire doorframe ~ the door remained shut. Grasping the panel edges to pull the door open with his fingers ended in futility. John drew his knife from its sheath to employ as a prybar, but the door refused to budge. "Crap."

John keyed his earbud. "Guys, I'm stuck in a room." He backed away from the door and tapped his earbud again. "Guys?" With deliberate action he drew his sidearm. "No more Mister Nice Guy." He aimed the weapon at the window to the hall.

John chose the angle and squeezed the trigger. The bullet zipped back past him as blue light arced from overhead to connect with the Beretta. Sparks exploded along the barrel, showering John with punishing points of light. Blackness descended.

SGA ~ SGA ~ SGA

"I see him!" Ronon cried, focusing his light while pounding on the window. "Sheppard! Sheppard! ...He's not moving." The big man walked over to examine the door to the room.

"Rodney?" Teyla asked and Rodney understood the implied question but couldn't allow himself to consider any answers.

"I don't know. I can't get the scan- Here. Take this," Rodney ordered and handed the device to Teyla.

"What shall I do with it?"

"Switch it to 'off'," Rodney commanded, then retrieved the handscanner once Teyla had followed his instructions.

"What good will that do?" Ronon grunted. He was braced halfway up the door frame, trying to gain leverage to pry open the door and, as far as Rodney could see, was doing no good.

"I'm taking a page from the John Sheppard Book of Computer Repair." Rodney hah-ed in triumph when the scanner came back on. He tapped keys. "Sheppard's alive. There's some kind of seal inside the- " The scanner shut down. Rodney handed it to Teyla and she obliged by turning it off and handing it back. "I'm reading a containment field. Give me time to override it."

"Forget that." Ronon slid to floor level and drew his blaster.

"No!" Rodney shouted. Sheppard's voice echoed the objection, accompanied by a jarring palm-slap to the window.

"Don't-do-it." Sheppard's command was muffled by the glass and his voice was strained. The colonel slapped the window again, although to Rodney it appeared the man was using the contact to maintain an upright position. "Pay-back."

Teyla tapped her earbud. "John, what do you mean?"

Sheppard shook his head and Rodney knew the radio signal couldn't penetrate the field in the room. It was clear their friend was struggling for control ~ each word was uttered loudly, distinctly, in between harsh panting to help him breathe through pain. "A...I. Whole...damned building... Power built...into...structure." Sheppard faltered and moaned. He squeezed his temples with his free hand and started again. "Central control... Diversion... Pull...the plug." Sheppard swayed, his long fingers trailed down the glass, and he collapsed to the ground.

"John!" Teyla directed her P90 light through the window. "He is still speaking, but I cannot hear him."

"He's not talking to us." Rodney quaked in shock; it all made a terrible kind of sense. "We are so screwed."

"Do something!" Ronon demanded. He grabbed the handscanner from Rodney's lax grip and turned it off before returning it.

"What do you expect me to do?!" Rodney answered angrily. "You heard him! This whole facility is an AI. That means it can channel halon gas in here and kill us the way it did the others or it could just choose to vent the at-"

"Rodney!" Teyla interrupted. "We cannot waste time worrying about what has not happened. We must free John."

At Teyla's encouraging nod Rodney went back to the handscanner to work with the new information, frustrated by having to block out the noise of the others' unsolicited discussion. Rodney raised his voice. "I'm guessing the AI zeroed in on Sheppard and his gene, probably trying to communicate with him." After more adjustments he continued, "If the power is laced throughout the structure, it's why I couldn't locate it and still can't identify it and it probably means we can't configure it for Atlan-"

"McKay!" Ronon shouted. "Unlock the door!"

Feeling panicked and pressured and put-upon Rodney snapped, "I'm working on it and this would go a whole lot faster if you two would stop whispering and let me think!"

"Rodney," Teyla said quietly, "we have said nothing."

Another shock rippled down Rodney's spine. He looked closely at his teammate. "I heard you! ...It's not you? Wait! You don't hear that? ...Oh, God. She's coming after me!"

"Rodney, focus," Teyla ordered gently. "You can do this."

"Sheppard said 'pull the plug'," Ronon commented. "There's a room in the third level. Looks like a control center."

Rodney barely heard any of it. The whispering was pounding in his head and he couldn't imagine what hell Sheppard was experiencing. The scanner screen dimmed slightly, then returned to full brightness. "Diversion! It's Sheppard! He's keeping her focus all on him. She can control her own tech, but the scanner can't communicate well with her system and she hasn't affected Earth technology at all ~ our lights or radios, which means she has limitations." He tapped buttons and honed his thoughts and the whispers faded. "If we take out her network, the underlying system should re-boot." He looked toward the dark window and urged, "For Sheppard's sake, we need to hurry."

Ronon flipped a lever on his blaster and prepared to leave.

"No, Ronon." Teyla spoke firmly. "You must stay here to help with John. I will go." She shouldered her P90 and then took hold of Ronon's gun when he offered it.

"First on the left, across from the stairs," Ronon described.

Teyla nodded once before sprinting to the stair access.

Ronon moved to stand in front of the door and Rodney cautioned, "The base system may not be able to operate without the integrated AI, so the door may not respond."

Ronon looked unconcerned. He partially drew a large blade from his forearm sheath, then slid it back in. "No problem."

It seemed to Rodney only seconds passed before staccato P90 gunfire echoed in the stairwell, followed by the boom of Ronon's blaster. The dim lighting in the hall flickered, off then on. Ronon waited. Rodney pulled out the scanner, pressed a couple buttons, then took a step forward and the door opened.

Ronon rushed past Rodney to check on Sheppard, who was sweating and pale. The colonel was mumbling, but Rodney wasn't sure he was conscious. Rodney helped lift Sheppard into Ronon's arms, then Rodney took the lead. The door opened to the hall ~ and froze part way. Lights flickered. The door began to close. Ronon shoved his charge at Rodney and shouldered his way into the shrinking opening. He wedged his back against one side and extended his arms to form an arch while gruffly instructing Rodney to drag Sheppard from the room.

Rodney staggered backwards through the entry, clumsy with his awkward hold on Sheppard. "Seriously, how can he weigh so much?" The colonel murmured something, but Rodney didn't hear. In the hall Rodney let go of his burden and took out the scanner. "Nonononono! She's rebuilding a network!"

Teyla's hurried footfalls were silenced when the door to the stairwell closed. Ronon halted in the process of lifting Sheppard and set his friend gently back on the floor. He pulled the blade Rodney recognized and hurried to pry open the stairwell door.

When Rodney arrived and stepped close to the door, the panel jerked as if to open but halted almost immediately. "Concentrate!" Ronon ordered, and Rodney was able to move the panel just barely, enough that Ronon could enlarge the space.

Teyla slipped through the narrow gap, her vest snagging on the edge. "We must hurry! I smelled gas after the door closed in front of me," she wheezed. "I will dial Atlantis." She handed back Ronon's blaster and ran toward the Gate Room. The glass partition had already begun to close. Teyla inserted herself in the entryway and shouted, "Rodney! You dial the Gate!"

Rodney squeezed past Teyla. Glancing back he saw Ronon settle Sheppard in a fireman's carry. The colonel still seemed semi-conscious, uttering with an almost musical cadence.

Below the DHD the laptop was still connected to the array. Rodney's blood chilled ~ the screen showed pages of data were being accessed. Rodney yanked the connecting cable before dialing Atlantis and was unnerved to see the link to the facility did not falter ~ information was being assimilated at an ever-increasing rate. The wormhole bloomed and Rodney sent his IDC. "We're coming in hot!" Chuck's reply was cut off mid-sentence.

Rodney went to his knees, typing vigorously to deactivate the wifi ~ which would not disengage. The next option was to remove screws from the housing in order to extract the battery.

In the hall Ronon had arrived. He traded places with Teyla to hold the door while she pulled Sheppard through the opening. "Rodney! Leave it!" Teyla called and beckoned him to come.

"I can't leave it! She's accessing information about Atlantis, Earth, addresses, codes. There's no way to predict what she can do with that kind of information and I can't take the computer with us because it could infect Atlantis!" Rodney stood and regretfully aimed his P90- Blue light arced from the wall array and flashed along the barrel in an angry display of sparks. Rodney crouched and covered his head in a storm of lightning. The fury expanded until a squall filled the Gate Room, the effect intensified by the rippling shadows of the Puddle. Wind whipped about Rodney's face. He stumbled away from his laptop and pulled out the scanner. "She's venting atmosphere!"

Teyla called, "Ronon!" just as the big man neared the event horizon with his shouldered burden. Momentum was carrying him forward. Teyla dove for his trouser leg and boot, held fast, and pulled. Slowly Sheppard and Ronon reappeared. As he fully re-materialized Ronon fell face-forward toward the floor. Teyla held onto Sheppard's vest to soften the colonel's descent.

Ronon had caught himself in an impromptu push-up. He rose to his feet, stunned. "What happened?" he rasped.

"We must destroy the facility!" Teyla answered hoarsely. She retrieved C4 from her own vest and Sheppard's and shouted with a cough, "Rodney, plant your C4 on the array!"

Rodney fished in his vest pocket, fighting to draw in breath enough to yell over the rush of escaping air. "You do know we don't have anywhere near enough C4 to destroy this place!" And that could mean the safety of Atlantis might not be that safe. Rodney's fingers were unsteady as he worked at his task.

Teyla tossed Ronon a brick of C4 and gestured where she wanted it placed. "Perhaps we cannot entirely destroy the facility, but we can bury the Gate in rubble!"

"In case you haven't noticed," Rodney panted as he approached, "she's learned enough so our radios no longer work, which means she can probably interfere with the detonator signal!"

Ronon drew his blaster. "You take Sheppard."

Rodney felt panic ruffling his nerves. Sheppard was still muttering and his face was pinched with pain. It was weird to be blowing up something without the colonel's finger on the button, just as it was weird for Rodney to have been the one to manipulate Ancient tech. Not that Rodney hadn't been called upon to save the team time after time...after time in his role as genius, but Sheppard was the one with the seat-of-the-pants blow-something-up plans...that somehow always seemed to work. Rodney's uncertainty was increasing with each gasp in the thinning atmosphere. He leaned down to grip his teammate under the arms. He adjusted his hold and backed into the shimmer. As he entered the vertical plane he heard Teyla tell Ronon to hurry.

Rodney emerged in Atlantis, a moment later Teyla appeared to his right, shortly thereafter Ronon stepped backwards through the Puddle. The shield rose immediately, just as the wormhole collapsed, a sign the Gate at the other end had been nullified.

SGA ~ SGA ~ SGA

"In the good ol' days I could have pulled the wifi card or yanked the battery," Rodney grumbled. He stabbed at a square of ham and seemed disgruntled enough to be chewing without tasting.

John smiled internally as he swirled his milky coffee in the mug. "You still wouldn't've been able to bring the laptop with you. She'd imprinted it. Once you powered it up, even without wifi, she'd have found a way to infect the whole city."

"That's exactly my point," McKay insisted. "She accessed data. We could learn something about the AI capability and structure just from seeing how she bridged the technologies."

"Let it go, Rodney," John ordered quietly.

"Are we certain she is now powerless?" Teyla asked in concern. "I am uneasy." She addressed McKay, the only one still eating dinner. "She knows our address and the codes of our allies. Could she trick us into exposing ourselves to her?"

Rodney finished chewing, then took a sip of his drink. "Yes and No. If that Gate were functioning it might be possible for her to send a false IDC and an infectious signal, but we were unable to re-establish contact and she has no physical capability to repair whatever damage was done to the Gate."

"She wouldn't need to transmit matter, only a signal." John spoke slowly, "Considering her learning curve..."

Rodney huffed in disgust. "Even if the control array had not been destroyed, she'd still have to find a way to power the Gate, which is completely isolated from her own power grid, and that's lucky for us, because if she'd been able to control the Gate she could have trapped us in her Little House of Horror."

"We cannot truly be certain of her ability," Teyla ventured.

"Which is why Elizabeth had the control crystal removed from our Gate for the time being. Nobody dials in or out." That was John's own suggestion. Having the AI in his head had given him a glimpse of her intelligence and determination.

Ronon added his two cents' worth: "The Daedalus will be here in two days. The place gets blown up. What's the worry?"

"I'm with you, Chewie," John nodded.

Rodney swallowed another bite. "I'm trying to convince Elizabeth to send a science team on the Daedalus before Caldwell gets trigger happy. I'm not saying we shouldn't destroy the facility and its resident harpy, but we should at least attempt to retrieve some data about the AI technology from my laptop."

John had closed his eyes. The headache he'd acquired during the mission was still present, despite a clean bill of health. And that brought him back to the fact he'd been under the weather for days. He opened his eyes. There was something about McKay's tone... "Why are you so determined to save the laptop?"

Rodney looked sheepish. "...Frogger." John could only stare. "What!" McKay demanded. "It's an effective way to relieve tension and it clears my head," he insisted. John maintained the stare. "Oh, all right. It has all my high scores."

John realized Teyla and Ronon were waiting for an explanation. "I couldn't possibly make it make sense," he said wearily.

"John, you are tired," Teyla observed. "And you have not eaten much all day. Are you still unwell?"

Rodney chimed in, "I told you if this is about your tummy bug, you should have stayed in bed. Maybe then you wouldn't have fallen under the AI's influence so someone else had to take over." He was smug. He leaned back in his chair to deliver his pronouncement: "That's why there's a relief player."

"Like a lady in waiting?" John asked, sharing a smile with Teyla and Ronon over the rim of his cup.

Rodney frowned in frustration. "More like the anchor. You know, the reliable support that keeps everything together."

"I thought anchors were deadweights that sank everything."

Teyla rushed in after Ronon's contribution and brought the conversation back to the original topic. "Perhaps Rodney is correct that you should not have gone on this mission."

"Actually," John contradicted after taking a milky sip, "it's the nausea that allowed me to separate fact from fiction."

"What does that mean," McKay wanted to know.

"When she spoke my name I realized she'd influenced me to go to that room," John recounted. "She was in my head, selecting memories. She used them to twist reality to manipulate me. So I concentrated on the nausea. I knew it was real."

"What were you mumbling?"

"She was acquiring English, Rodney. Being very aggressive about it, to make it easier to communicate. I wasn't going to make control easy for her." John grinned. " ...'twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe." He turned to Teyla and Ronon. "That purposely does _not_ make sense." John smiled at Rodney. "And then I went on to 'Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious'." John advised Teyla and Ronon, "Don't think about it. We'll slate it for a future Team Movie Night."

McKay was nodding brusquely. "That could have confused her...or at least kept her pre-occupied so the B-player could take over." After making his self-aggrandizing statement, Rodney returned to a frequent grievance. "An Ancient experiment-gone-wrong left around to be tripped over. The tainted technology can't be used and the first time anyone visits, it has to be destroyed."

"I'm not sure we were the first," John remarked. "I had the sense she was vaguely aware but confused by you, and sort of blind to Teyla and Ronon. Anyone without the gene could've visited, found the DHD, and left. She didn't pay any attention to Teyla until the central controls were destroyed."

"And then she closed the door before adding gas," McKay recalled. "Which means she wanted to keep you alive and as long as we were all together, she wouldn't have harmed us as a group. Partially venting atmosphere would have knocked us out and given her time to figure out how to trap us there for good."

"And that is why I am uneasy," Teyla inserted.

"Understandably; too much capability is dangerous ~ absolute power, et cetera, et cetera," Rodney lectured. "Her ability to alter the physical environment is more dangerous than mind control. She had no effect on Ronon and Teyla and only a minor connection with me. Judging by her influence with Sheppard, she could probably easily manipulate Ancients. So, either she felt threatened by them or they wouldn't accede to her demands. Hence, halon gas. If I had my laptop we could see what she was perusing and we might figure out what she wanted."

John stated flatly, "I know what she wanted." He looked at Teyla. "A body. She had your voice."

Rodney snapped his fingers. "Yes, I heard it. Sort of. You know, I initially thought the Ancients were trying to create a city system that was more intellectually interactive with the gene, but I wonder if what we discovered at the facility is early Replicator technology, when the Ancients were first developing intelligence for their nanite systems."

Then the genie escaped the bottle ~ the machines became self-aware Asurans. John thought of what Elizabeth had been through with the nanite infection, what he'd just experienced, and what the future would surely bring in conflict with the Replicators. "There was a lesson to be learned. The Ancients didn't learn it." *~*

. . .

Author's Note: In The Long Goodbye (2.16) a halon-gas, fire-suppression system was described for Atlantis. Halon has largely been replaced as a suppressant because of its effect on ozone.

Frogger is an arcade game originally developed by the Japanese company Konami in 1981 and currently made available for multiple platforms.

Lines were quoted from Jabberwocky, a poem by Lewis Carroll, first published in its entirety in Through the Looking-Glass - And What Alice Found There (1871).

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is a song written by the Sherman Brothers (Robert, Richard) for the 1964 Disney film, Mary Poppins.

Reference is made to the quotation 'Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely' by British politician Lord Acton (John Dalberg-Acton, first Baron Acton [1834-1902]).

Language explanation: The idiom 'second string' in sports refers to the substitute (second-choice) players who are brought in when the starting players (first tier) are unavailable. In general, second string refers to a back-up/alternate plan to be used if the first course of action fails.

The one-liner that became this story was 'create a situation in which it is better not to have the gene'.

I take this space to give my thanks to everyone who has taken an interest in my stories:

\- For the Guests who leave reviews, I thank you here because I cannot contact you personally.

\- For the registered readers, I try to write individual thanks to people who send PMs, leave reviews, and/or who single out my work or me as an author. The FF system, however, doesn't always let me know when someone has left reviews or PMs or has tagged me or my stories. I don't visit the FF site often (mostly just around the time a new story is posted - think dial-up and that will put things in perspective!). Sometimes when I sign in I find more PMs waiting than what the FF system has forwarded to me, but I can respond to those. If someone tags or reviews [especially older] stories, well, if FF doesn't notify me, those people may be overlooked; it could be ages (if at all) before I discover their input. So, if you haven't heard from me, it's because I'm unaware of you - sorry 'bout that. If you do want to hear from me, best bet is a PM.

Again, my thanks to everyone reading this. It's a sad fact that even though my following is growing (which frankly surprises me, considering how long SGA has been off the air), the SGA Fandom is shrinking. I'm glad you readers are still out there keeping SGA alive!

Above and beyond, for Iuvsbruce and her hubby, for answering the phone, even in the midst of their own chaos. Thanks.

Feedback is always appreciated.

Thanks for reading.


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